Monthly Archives: October 2016

It has come to our knowledge that Apple company has recently released the first important updates for both iOS and macOS. That’s what is worth being discussed!

iOS 10.1 encloses a great number of enhancements and bug fixes, but the distinctive appendage is Portrait Camera, a feature formerly advertised by Apple for the iPhone 7 Plus only.

Portrait Camera uses the dual cameras of the iPhone 7 Plus, which helps create a depth-of-field effect that shows the foreground in sharp focus, gently blurring the background at the same time.

It is known that iOS 10.1 introduces the feature as a beta, a move Apple has used in the past, exclusively with its Maps, to excuse the initial results, gather information from users, and slowly ameliorate the underlying software after all.

The most credible sources report that Apple has also fixed 13 security vulnerabilities with iOS 10.1.

Apple company debuted iOS 10 on Sept. 13. It is expected that the operating system will run on iPhone 5 and later, iPad Pro, iPad Air and later, iPad Mini 2 and later, and the fifth-generation iPod Touch.

In the meanwhile, macOS Sierra 10.12.1 patches 16 vulnerabilities and addresses some non-security defects. Among the latter are a compatibility improvement with Microsoft Office, and a fix to a Mail updating issue.

Sierra, which runs on most Macs sold in 2009-2010 and later, hit the Mac App Store on Sept. 20.

Meet the diversity of the world of emojis on Android 7.1, the options available in the Unicode 9 update completely embraced by Google!

Now, if somebody asks you what you do for a living, you have every reason to send him a little man or woman demonstrating your profession. Examples include artist, astronaut, judge, firefighter, scientist, student, and technologist.

When touching and holding on any of these Emojis, you’ll then be able to select from various skin tone options and genders available. Additionally, there are also pictures of parent families and other amusing symbols. The rainbow pride flag, male and female symbols, and the staff of Aesculapius.

There is also a “silver bridge” for many of the new emoji. For instance, “female mechanic” will display as a woman and a wrench emoji next to each other on platforms that don’t support the “female mechanic” symbol.

Emojipedia has a full description of the new friends that are waiting for you in the keyboard. Check them out yourself if you have a Pixel or have opted into the Android 7.1 developer preview. Outside of the new emojis, some actual emojis have received a necessary visual update.

Why do I need emojis on Android 7.1?

Nowadays, emojis are essential to communicate online. Any dialog would be imperfect without them. People of all ages like them not just because they are easy to use in messages, but also because they help express emotions in a way that is understood much better than simple text. Emojis have done a bad job of representing the diversity of people and showing women and men equally in some trades, thus intensifying stereotypes. The new Emoji options in Unicode 9 go a long way toward addressing this. They’ll be available in supported keyboards when your phone gets the Android 7.1 update. If you have a Pixel, they’re already there.

Are you ready to hear about the products Microsoft has got rid of in 2016? Don’t be scared of this news!

A lot of ingenious products has been created in 2016 within the walls of Microsoft Corporation. Let’s recall… There is the latest edition of Windows Server, additions to its Azure cloud platform and increased availability of its futuristic HoloLens mixed reality technology. But the life-cycle of the Microsoft products isn’t perpetual. Some of them are demolished, some become outmoded. So the graveyard of outdated products and solutions widens for years and years.

Now it’s the turn of following ones.

Sunrise calendar app

The sun set on September 13 on this calendar app for iOS, Android, Mac and the Web, after Microsoft “kept our promise to bring the magic of Sunrise to the Outlook calendar – and the Outlook inbox while we were at it…”

Project Astoria

You decidedly need a scoresheet to keep up with all the ins and outs of Windows 10, but one remarkable change early in the year was Microsoft’s decision to ax Project Astoria, which had been launched last year at the company’s Build event. Astoria was a glue created to help developers bring Android apps to the Universal Windows Platform. Microsoft is now pushing Xamarin, a dev platform it acquired earlier in 2016.

Windows Essentials 2012

It’s worth noticing that Microsoft Corporation is pulling the plug on support for this suite, which includes Live Mail, on Jan. 10, 2017. Live Mail users were given advance notice about upgrading from the free app to the Mail App on Windows or using Outlook.com on the Web. The company is familiarizing customers with its Office 365 world, which is remarkable for its new security and communications protocols that the older system doesn’t support.

Project Spark

After the platform for enabling users to build games with no coding experience went into maintenance mode in September, Microsoft company withdrew its Project Spark game creation platform from the Windows Store and Xbox Marketplace. This was an incredibly difficult agreement… It was just no longer executable to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping “Project Spark” up and running, according to Microsoft team assertion.

Windows IE 8, 9 & 10

In January, Microsoft informed customers that it was ending support for its IE 8, 9 & 10 browsers. This fact forced people and organizations to move to IE 11 or Edge, the new default browser for Windows 10. On the other hand, IE 8, 9 and 10 will still work, but you really run a security risk by continuing to use them.

Microsoft (Skype) Qik

Maybe you haven’t ever realized that there were times when Microsoft (Skype) Qik used to gain a lead. Buried somewhere within the spin in this blog post by Microsoft’s Skype team is the news that Skype Qik was being eliminated because it had too many similar features that have been added to Skype over the years as the service has increasingly been employed by mobile users. Skype bought the short video messaging service dubbed Qik back in 2011 shortly before Microsoft snapped up Skype, and then Microsoft released Skype Qik in 2014.

Lumia phones

Soon enough we’ll hear about a terrible murder that Microsoft has been planning for a long time. The destiny of Lumia phones is predetermined. Microsoft has decided to give a lark to catch a kite. In other words, Lumia will be killed in favor of Surface phone.

Microsoft Earn

Microsoft announced in October that it would stop accepting new members and would be closing its Earn program on March, 2017. Earn enabled people in certain states (Arizona, Massachusetts, Washington) to build up credit to spend in the Microsoft Store by shopping at other retailers such as Starbucks and Whole Foods that were approved by Microsoft. Earn, still labeled as Beta, released in 2015.

Great news! This week Apple and IBM company launched their first iOS app for academia. It was an important step forward to set themselves the task of blending student data with curriculum and cognitive technology to improve and enhance personalized education for K-12 students. And the goal has been finally attained owing to IBM Watson Element for Educators.

Apple and IBM joined efforts in a new way to astonish the customers and clients. IBM Watson Element for Educators, a new iPad app from the companies, has been created to provide teachers with a more integral view of students’ academic progress, attainments, progress, interests, and learning activities in grades K-12. IBM company started to work on the initiative in 2013 and quickened development following its 2014 partnership with Apple. As a result, MobileFirst for iOS program has been designed.

It was essential for the companies to reconstruct the educational experience for both teachers and students by coupling IBM data, analytics and cognitive computing with Apple’s design and user experience, in accordance with Chalapathy Neti, vice president of education innovation for IBM Watson.

Watson, IBM’s cognitive technology, pulls from three data classes to align curriculum with students’ proficiencies and interests, as recorded by educators, according to Neti. IBM Watson Element for Educators uses recorded behaviors and interests in order to provide insight on students’ proficiencies, to determine the types of personalized content and learning environments that can best engage them, Neti says.

Some readers may think this app is a system of record for educators. But indeed, it’s rather a portal through which teachers can access, handle and gain insights from various data sets. Data that are used by the application can exist in different systems, as is the norm with most school districts, including the Coppell Independent School District (ISD) in Texas, the first academic institution to use Watson Element.

Relevant data will be integrated into the app due to the work of Apple and IBM company which is expected to help educators keep tabs on students’ learning paths and record observations about their preferred learning styles. Ultimately, customized plans, improving over time, will be built.

Approximately 150 educators across four schools in Coppell ISD are using Watson Element at the present time, and the district plans to have the app in the hands of all of its teachers by next year. The teachers have had access to iPads for about three years, that’s why the tablet and some iOS apps are already habitual for their lesson designs.

Teachers can also integrate training programs or other published material, as well as lesson plans, textbooks, videos, and open-sourced data, to further customize their district’s instance of Watson Element.

The new iPad app, created by Apple and IBM, is available to educators at a per-year, per-student price, plus a one-time setup cost that includes integration with school districts’ existing training programs, databases and technologies.

IBM company shared experience adopting Apple Macs for its employees instead of Windows-machines. This process begun in mid-2015. Today IBM has about 90 000 Macs among which are desktop computers and laptops. An amazing fact is that these Macs are supported by five admins only.

During a four-year period, IBM company is going to save approximately $543. This amount would have been blown on PC-support.

«But isn’t it expensive, and doesn’t it overload IT? No. IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 – $543 per Apple Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan. “And this reflects the best pricing we’ve ever gotten from Microsoft,” Previn said. Multiply that number by the 100,000+ Macs IBM expects to have deployed by the end of the year, and we’re talking some serious savings.».

Popularity of Apple Macs is growing very quickly with IMB employees, 73 percent claiming they would like their next machine to be a Mac. In order to keep up with demand, IBM is deploying 1,300 new Macs every week, using Jamf and Apple’s Device Enrollment Program to get new users set up quickly.

Alongside with IBM’s roaring success, the Jamf conference also emphasized the fact that Apple products had found a use in schools and in healthcare. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, students across 11 elementary schools, six middle schools, and four high schools successfully use iPads and MacBooks in the classroom to meet unique learning needs.

At the forthcoming Jacobs Medical Center at the University of California, San Diego, iPads and Apple TVs will be placed and installed in 245 patient rooms to make it easier for patients to access their medical records, get medication reminders, and control lights, blinds, and room temperature.

Get ready to meet the forthcoming version of the language Swift 4.0 developed by Apple company. After releasing version 3.0, the next version 4.0 is expected to be released next year.

The upgrade will range from resilience to memory ownership model to strings, with special focus on source stability for code and ABI stability for the standard library, as provided by documentation in GitHub.

To this effect, according to the plan, the Swift 4 release is divided into two steps. Firstly, Apple will consider those features that don’t impact on fundamental changing of the ABI of existing features in the language to a considerable degree.

Top-priority features corresponding to step 1 goals include accommodations to support code bases targeting different language versions, so Swift can deliver on source compatibility goals while progress goes on.

Another feature of step 1 is the resilience that can make APIs evolve while maintaining a stable ABI. Apple is looking for resilience that would eliminate the fragile base class problem that fairly often occurs in some object-oriented languages by describing types of API modifications that can be made without breaking the ABI.

It is said that Apple emphasizes generics improvements needed in the standard library. The library has several workarounds for language shortcomings, and “if the underlying language deficiencies remain, they become a permanent part of the stable ABI,” the documentation says. “Conditional conformances, recursive protocol requirements, and where clauses for associated types are known to be in this category, but it’s plausible that other features will be in scope if they would be used in the standard library.”

System programmers are seeking an opt-in Cyclone/Rust-inspired model for memory ownership models in high-performance applications. “This feature will fundamentally shape the ABI, from low-level language concerns such as ‘inout’ and low-level ‘addressors’ to its impact on the standard library,” says the GitHub documentation. “While a full memory ownership model is likely too large for Swift 4 stage 1, we need a comprehensive design to understand how it will change the ABI.”

Apple company claims it needs to amend code generation, notably interaction with the language’s runtime, to stabilize the ABI. “While not specifically user-facing, the decisions here affect performance and (in some rare cases) the future evolution of Swift.” The upgrade also seeks to make strings more powerful and easier to use while retaining correctness with Unicode.

The second step of Swift 4.0’s development, anticipated next spring, begins when implementation of step 1 features is “cresting” and contains various large and small features.

Taking account of efficient VMware’s cloud infrastructure and business mobility solutions, one should admit IT systems and end-user environments are not tied any more to physical hardware. The bounds are broken, and both IT and the business are provided with more efficiency, agility and control.

VMware is famous for its successful solutions in the area of virtualization and automation of compute, networking and storage resources from the desktop to the data center and to the cloud. The open standards supported by the technologies, as well as the technologies themselves, provide a powerful basis approved and chosen by over 500,000 customers worldwide. VMware exams and certifications are preferred by IT specialists willing to earn trusted and reliable modern credentials. Exploring the VMware advantages, more and more professionals decide to sit for its exams.

But sooner or later some of the exams are doomed to disappear as time slips by. In part, this is the result of the intention to make VMware certification the most relevant and active virtualization certification in the market. This is the reason why older versions of VMware products are to be retired. And so, we are going to talk about the two exams associated with the VMware Certified Professional 5 – Data Center Virtualization (VCP5-DCV) certification.

VCP5-DCV Exam (VCP550)

VCP5-DCV Delta Exam (VCP550D)

New registrations will not be available for these exams starting from March 15, 2017. If you are making a new exam appointment, you must schedule it before March 31, 2017.

After the date these exams are retired you will no longer be able to earn a new VCP5-DCV certification. Of course, if you already hold the VCP5-DCV certification, it will remain yours as long as you recertify every two years.

If you have any specific questions or concerns, please contact the Certification Support team.

Last month, four new self-paced training courses were launched by the VMware Education Services team. These courses cover Horizon 7, vCloud Air, and VMware User Environment Manager. If you have any questions concerning the information about the courses, don’t be shy about asking the Education Specialist for your area.

Taking this free eLearning course, you can be sure you’ll learn fundamental information about vCloud Air and understand how to move or extend your on-premises data center to vCloud Air. This VMware training course overviews vCloud Air, the common challenges with public cloud offerings, general barriers to public cloud adoption, and how vCloud Air helps vanquish these barriers. It then explores the vCloud Air service offerings and features, security and compliance standards, and networking concepts and services connected with vCloud Air. In addition, course listeners will be able to recognize diverse management tools that one can use to manage the vCloud Air environment with the on-premises virtual infrastructure.

Another free VMware training course offers you basic information for understanding of the VMware Horizons portfolio, as well as the key features and benefits. It also examines the components and architecture of Horizon 7, the features of the Horizon Desktop, the Horizon Agent and Horizon Client. Additionally, you will be shown how to login and navigate the features and functionality of Horizon Administrator.

The third free 90-minute training course provides a brief survey of UEM, its components, features, and benefits. The course also clarifies the UEM installation and configuration process and the features available in the UEM Management Console.

The last self-paced VMware course is useful since it gives you the abilities to deliver virtual desktops and applications by means of a single virtual desktop infrastructure platform. This VMware training course builds your skills in installing, configuring, and managing VMware Horizon® 7 through a combination of lecture and practical lessons. You will learn how to configure and deploy pools of virtual machines, how to manage access and security of the machines, and how to provide a customized desktop environment to end users.

Which course would you like to take? Which one is more effective? Share your opinions in comments below!

The end is a new beginning. While Red Hat is retiring its old certification exams, other new exams are next in turn. Being the world’s most trusted provider of Linux® and open source technology, Red Hat delivers an exhaustive portfolio of secure products and services using open, collaborative business model and an affordable, predictable subscription model. Its certifications and exams are popular among IT specialists worldwide. No wonder some Red Hat certificates are abolished.

Today we’ll talk about another credential called Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Seam. As you have probably guessed, it is no longer available.

If you have already earned the Red Hat® Certificate of Expertise in Seam, you can undoubtedly show the skills, abilities and knowledge necessary to use Seam to tie together components when developing applications. You are proficient in:

Rapid application development

Creating an industry-standard user interface

Integrating the Java™ Persistence API (JPA)

Implementing end-to-end application security

Using integrated tooling with Red Hat JBoss® Developer Studio

It’s so fortunate you have got this valuable certificate! If you haven’t, never mind. Because except Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Seam, there is a variety of other certification exams that Red Hat offers IT professionals.

Finally, there is a possibility for you to zoom in on screenshots, and the ‘Entertainment’ section has been renamed to ‘Movies, Music, Books’.

Google Play Store is considered to be always under construction which means it adds and renews tweaks and overhauls. The latest round of changes isn’t so gripping, but they can help you find what you’re searching for or more deeply examine some applications.

It’s worth noticing that the main landing page has changed the section named “Entertainment” to “Movies, Music, Books.” This update is certain to simplify users’ tasks and make them understand what they can get in this section. It’s kind of a tight fit on smaller screens (this was taken from a Nexus 5X) but may look fine on phones, such as the Pixel XL or others with a big screen.

Another most conspicuous change is that you can finally pinch and zoom on screenshots. It’s really helpful for picking out more details before deciding whether you want to download that app.

Maybe you have already observed, when clicking a link to the Play Store from Chrome or another browser, you go right to a preview page that now is notable for much larger Google Play Store branding.

Various Play Store sections being navigated, the white search bar vanishes. If you want to get to a voice search, it’s necessary to tap the bar and the microphone icon. For Google to make such a change, the company likely determined that few people were performing voice searches in the Play Store.

Indeed, the most useful change Google made is the possibility to zoom in on screenshots. It may seem to be a minor thing, but with some game screenshots this makes it easier to figure out exactly what’s going on. And it may help those on smaller screens to get a better view of the action.